Jonathan I. Cloud
 |
|
If you have ever wished teens weren’t so rebellious, you won’t after reading this book. It is an explanation of spirited youth and the heroic roles they struggle to have in society. Rebelliousness is a part of this struggle, an inborn drive to demonstrate high self-worth that opposes families, schools, and communities that restrict them to roles that offer no means of being special, daring, and invincible. Notions about adolescence create such restrictions. The book counters them with findings and perspectives from human and social science, philosophy, myth, and cultural history to show that spirited youth: 1) innately struggle to realize potentials of their awakening spiritual intelligence; 2) aren’t adequately supported by modern forms of parenting, family, and community; 3) respond well to authoritative validation and properly resist authoritarian control; 4) lose optimism about what they can become when forced to be obedient and dependent; and 5) will become a Guardian Class that defends and creates good in communities when they are consistently validated.
A validating approach to parenting that extends beyond one or two adults in a nuclear family is presented. Guidelines are offered on how it can support youth spiritual development, which is manifested by behavior that departs from established norms, encounters trials and tests, and confronts adversaries and dangers. This pattern of behavior produces positive change when adults nurture, affirm, and engage what is actually underway: 1) struggling for freedoms, possibilities, and opportunities; 2) aspiring to be special, daring, and invincible; 3) seeking to change things through defiance, challenge, and aggression; and 4) discovering the calling, purpose, and vision for their lives.
Jonathan I. Cloud has a combined twenty-five years of experience in child welfare, mental health, foster care, community organizing, juvenile justice, youth development, and delinquency prevention. Since 1995, he has served as a consultant for the U. S. Departments of Justice, Education, Defense, and Health and Human Services. On their behalf he has provided training and technical assistance to over 200 municipalities in the areas of delinquency prevention, school safety, gun violence reduction, gang violence reduction, substance abuse prevention, protecting child victims of commercial sexual exploitation, and community-youth development. These efforts included leadership roles in four national initiatives each of which encompassed developing community-wide strategic plans. His blend of federal, state, and local experience has given him a unique perspective on efforts to address problems affecting families, children, and youth over the last two decades. He has arrived at significant conclusions about what else needs to be done on behalf of youth who are often seen as rebellious and families that are often seen as dysfunctional, both of which are typically dealt with in ways that undermine their potentials. He is dedicating his personal and professional lives to his vision of concerned adults, in partnership with youth-serving professionals and voluntary organizations, working together to better understand these youth and their families and support the latter in training the innate spiritedness of the former to contribute to the well-being of schools, peer groups, and communities. He has a B.A. Degree in Biblical Studies, a B.A. Degree in Psychology, along with graduate studies in Social Work and Public Administration. He has one son who is currently serving in the U. S. Marine Corps.
Spirited youth possess an acute sense of their innate high and noble self-worth. This sense of self compels them to engage in valiant actions that affect and are seen by others. They undertake actions that they believe will, by the effect they have on others, earn them validation of their worth. As such, those who see their valiant actions are expected to provide this validation, which in turn bolsters their pride, a primary emotion of spirited individuals. Their pride then elevates the manner in which they develop and express trustworthiness, autonomy, initiative, industry, identity, and solidarity with others.
Given the good that will be produced by spirited youth when they are deeply validated for valiant actions that affect others in positive ways and when they are given sufficient supports to make choosing such actions the preferred way of expressing their sense of noble self-worth, one would think that doing both would be enthusiastically undertaken by adults. This has not been the case in America. Many of the extensively catalogued and studied misbehavior and juvenile delinquency problems that have arisen as a result have been blamed on youth. This book is about ending this blame game. Where, then, do we start? We start with how this blame game was invented.
The remarkable thing is that in spite of this well-documented phenomenon, many youth nevertheless still possess a noble sense of themselves. They remain spirited. They do so despite ways of parenting rooted in three inventions that together contributed to the triumph of industrialism. Let’s explore the inventions.
The first invention was adolescence. It was carelessly invented by social scientists during the early 1900s. It is now recognized by many social scientists as an arbitrary and contrived category that functions as a holding stage that keeps youth in limbo.[1] Living in limbo makes it very difficult for our children and youth to grow up. This is because growing up actually involves developing magnificent forms of trustworthiness, autonomy, initiative, industry, identity, and solidarity with others. Growing up in this sense is about becoming a person of renown or eminence (which has nothing to do with being well known or popular). Thus, this limbo also makes it difficult for our culture to evolve. This is because cultures evolve well when each generation develops levels of trustworthiness, autonomy, and the rest that are higher than the levels attained by their forebears. In other words, each generation is nobler than the one preceding it and renews our society in ways that are more far reaching than those of the preceding generation. All we seem to care about is whether children will be better off financially than their parents.
The limbo in which youth live is especially harmful to identity. To form an identity is to establish one’s unique special, daring, and masterful ways of attaining achievements that society values and needs. Since such achievements necessitate being involved in society in important ways, the limbo created by the invention of adolescence has created a widespread identity crisis among youth. This is basic! But rather than honestly addressing this matter, confusion in youth identity formation is essentially accepted as a normal part of youth development in modern society. We expect them to be confused about who they are and what choices they should make for their lives. From an evolutionary perspective, this is total insanity. It certainly isn’t intelligent.
[1] Joseph Chilton Pearce, Evolution’s End: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence, New York: HarperCollins, 1992, p. 189.
